December 5 in History

Five students from the College of William and Mary gathered in the Apollo Room of the Raleigh Tavern in Williamsburg, Virginia, on December 5, 1776, to establish Phi Beta Kappa, the first scholastic fraternity in the United States. The timing was remarkable: the American Revolution was underway, British troops threatened Virginia, and the college itself would be occupied by soldiers within months. Yet these students chose to create an organization dedicated to the life of the mind. The founders established a set of principles that distinguished Phi Beta Kappa from the social clubs and drinking societies that already existed on colonial campuses. Members would be selected on the basis of intellectual achievement rather than social standing, wealth, or family connections. The society adopted a secret handshake, a motto in Greek, and a gold key as its emblem. The original William and Mary chapter was forced to suspend operations during the British occupation, but not before authorizing branches at Yale and Harvard. Those chapters survived and expanded the organization into a national network that eventually included more than 290 chapters at universities across the country. Phi Beta Kappa's insistence on academic merit as the sole criterion for membership established a lasting standard for scholarly honor societies and influenced the creation of numerous disciplinary organizations that followed the same model. Election to Phi Beta Kappa remains one of the most recognized academic distinctions in American higher education.

President James K. Polk confirmed before Congress on December 5, 1848, what rumor had been whispering for months: gold had been discovered in extraordinary quantities in California. Polk displayed a tea caddy containing 230 ounces of California gold to a stunned chamber, transforming a distant territorial acquisition into the most frenzied mass migration in American history. Within weeks, the Gold Rush was on. James Marshall had first spotted gold flakes in the tailrace of John Sutter's sawmill at Coloma on January 24, 1848, just nine days before Mexico formally ceded California to the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Sutter tried to keep the discovery secret, fearing it would destroy his agricultural empire. He was right. Workers abandoned his fields, squatters overran his land, and his vast holdings were eventually consumed by the rush he had tried to suppress. Polk's message to Congress served as an official confirmation that catalyzed a global migration. Approximately 300,000 people descended on California between 1849 and 1855. They came from the eastern states, Mexico, China, Chile, Australia, and Europe. San Francisco, a sleepy settlement of 200 in early 1848, exploded into a city of 36,000 by 1852. Ships were abandoned in the harbor as their entire crews deserted for the gold fields. The Gold Rush produced enormous wealth but distributed it brutally. Most individual miners went broke. The real fortunes went to merchants, landowners, and companies that supplied the miners. California's Native American population was devastated by violence, disease, and displacement, dropping from roughly 150,000 to 30,000 within two decades. California achieved statehood in 1850, entering the Union as a free state and intensifying the sectional crisis that led to the Civil War. Polk's tea caddy set all of it in motion.

America's thirteen-year experiment with banning alcohol ended on December 5, 1933, when Utah became the 36th state to ratify the Twenty-first Amendment, reaching the three-quarters threshold needed to repeal the Eighteenth Amendment. Bars that had operated as speakeasies the day before threw open their doors legally. President Franklin Roosevelt reportedly celebrated by mixing martinis in the White House. Prohibition had been sold as a moral crusade. The temperance movement, drawing support from Protestant churches, women's suffrage advocates, and progressive reformers, had spent decades arguing that alcohol was the root cause of poverty, domestic violence, and political corruption. The Eighteenth Amendment, ratified in 1919, banned the manufacture, sale, and transportation of intoxicating liquors. The Volstead Act defined anything above 0.5 percent alcohol as illegal. The law achieved some of its goals. Alcohol consumption initially dropped by roughly 30 percent, and alcohol-related hospital admissions declined. But the unintended consequences overwhelmed the benefits. Organized crime syndicates, led by figures like Al Capone in Chicago, built empires on bootlegging. Speakeasies outnumbered the legal saloons they replaced. Enforcement costs ballooned while tax revenue from alcohol vanished entirely. Corruption of police and federal agents became endemic. The Great Depression delivered the final blow. With unemployment at 25 percent and government revenue collapsing, the economic argument for re-legalizing a taxable commodity became irresistible. FDR campaigned on repeal in 1932 and won in a landslide. The Twenty-first Amendment remains the only constitutional amendment that repeals a previous one, a permanent reminder that even well-intentioned social engineering can produce consequences worse than the problem it aimed to solve.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart died in Vienna on December 5, 1791, at the age of thirty-five. The cause of death has never been definitively established, and the medical debate has continued for over two centuries: rheumatic fever, kidney disease, trichinosis from undercooked pork, mercury poisoning, and Henoch-Schonlein purpura have all been proposed by physicians and historians working from fragmentary accounts of his final symptoms. He was buried in a common grave at St. Marx Cemetery, in accordance with Viennese burial regulations of the period that prohibited elaborate interments for commoners. The burial was not a mark of poverty or disgrace, as later romanticized accounts suggested, but standard practice for someone of his social class. The Requiem in D minor that he was composing when he died was left incomplete and was finished by his student Franz Xussmayr from sketches and verbal instructions. Exactly which portions Mozart completed and which Xussmayr composed or extrapolated has been debated by musicologists ever since, with particular controversy surrounding the Lacrimosa, which breaks off after eight bars in Mozart's hand. In his thirty-five years, he composed forty-one symphonies, twenty-seven piano concertos, twenty-three string quartets, eighteen masses, twenty-two operas, and hundreds of other works across every musical form of his era. He was paid well for his compositions during his lifetime but spent extravagantly on housing, clothing, and entertainment, dying with almost nothing in the bank. His wife Constanze survived him by fifty years and spent much of that time managing his posthumous reputation, correcting inaccuracies, and ensuring that his manuscripts were preserved and catalogued.

Alexandre Dumas died on December 5, 1870, at 68, penniless and partially paralyzed from a stroke, in his son's house at Puys, near Dieppe. The man who had earned millions from The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo spent it all. A chateau with a monkey theater. A private newspaper. Mistresses across Europe. Five hundred meals a week for anyone who showed up at his door. Born on July 24, 1802, in Villers-Cotterets, northeast of Paris, Dumas was the grandson of a Haitian slave and a French nobleman. His father, Thomas-Alexandre Dumas, was a French general born Marie-Thomas-Davy de la Pailleterie in Saint-Domingue (modern Haiti), the son of a white marquis and an enslaved Black woman. Thomas-Alexandre rose to the rank of general of the armies of the Republic, the highest rank in the French military, making him the highest-ranking person of African descent in a European army. Alexandre Dumas the novelist used his father's extraordinary life as raw material for The Count of Monte Cristo. He wrote over 300 books, many dictated to collaborators he called his "factory." The most famous collaborator, Auguste Maquet, plotted and drafted substantial portions of several major works. The arrangement was openly discussed in literary Paris but didn't diminish Dumas's fame; his talent was in transforming raw material into prose that moved at the speed of a galloping horse. The Three Musketeers, serialized in 1844, became the most popular adventure novel in Europe. It spawned sequels, adaptations, and an industry. The Count of Monte Cristo, also serialized in 1844-1846, was equally successful. Together, the two books made Dumas the most widely read novelist of the nineteenth century. His ancestry made his success a quiet revolution. Europe's most popular novelist was of Black descent in an era that denied Black people basic citizenship. He never denied his heritage, though biographers have debated how openly he discussed it. He was buried at Villers-Cotterets. In 2002, his remains were moved to the Pantheon in Paris, joining Voltaire, Rousseau, Hugo, and Zola.

Nelson Mandela spent 27 years in prison. For eighteen of those years, he was on Robben Island, off the coast of Cape Town, cracking limestone in a quarry under the South African sun. He was permitted one letter and one visitor every six months. The glare from the quarry permanently damaged his eyesight. Born Rolihlahla Mandela in Mvezo, Transkei on July 18, 1918, he was the son of a Thembu chief. He attended the University of Fort Hare and the University of the Witwatersrand, where he studied law. He joined the African National Congress in 1944 and helped found its Youth League. After the National Party came to power in 1948 and formalized apartheid, Mandela became a leader of the resistance. He initially advocated nonviolent protest. After the Sharpeville massacre of 1960, in which police killed 69 unarmed Black protesters, he co-founded Umkhonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC, and directed a campaign of sabotage against government infrastructure. He was arrested in 1962 and sentenced to life imprisonment at the Rivonia Trial in 1964. On Robben Island and later at Pollsmoor and Victor Verster prisons, he became the world's most famous political prisoner. International sanctions, economic pressure, and internal resistance gradually forced the apartheid government to negotiate. President F.W. de Klerk announced Mandela's release on February 11, 1990. Mandela walked free, holding his then-wife Winnie's hand, before a crowd of thousands. When he walked free, the world expected rage. What came instead was a man who invited his former jailer to his presidential inauguration. He negotiated with de Klerk to dismantle apartheid, a process that could have plunged South Africa into civil war at any point. He became South Africa's first Black president in 1994, inheriting a country on the edge. It didn't burn. He served one term and stepped down voluntarily. He died on December 5, 2013, at 95. The question his whole life answered: what does it take to forgive something unforgivable?

Colonel Henry Knox, a 25-year-old bookseller turned artillerist, set out from Fort Ticonderoga on December 5, 1775, to drag 60 tons of captured British cannons across 300 miles of frozen wilderness to the siege lines around Boston. The mission, which George Washington considered essential to breaking the British occupation, required Knox to transport 59 cannons, mortars, and howitzers by ox-drawn sledges across the Berkshire Mountains in the dead of winter. Military logistics of this scale had never been attempted in North America. Fort Ticonderoga, captured by Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold in May 1775, held a substantial arsenal of British artillery that the Continental Army desperately needed. Washington's forces surrounding Boston had few cannons capable of threatening the British garrison. Knox, who had learned artillery science from books in his Boston shop, volunteered for the seemingly impossible task and received Washington's blessing. The "Noble Train of Artillery" moved south along Lake George by boat, then overland by ox-drawn sledges through January snowstorms and thaws. Knox's men reinforced frozen river crossings, hauled cannons up mountain passes, and improvised solutions when ice gave way beneath the loads. One cannon crashed through thin ice on the Hudson River and had to be fished out. Knox kept a diary recording temperatures, distances, and the steady profanity of his teamsters. The cannons arrived at Washington's camp in Framingham, Massachusetts, in late January 1776. Washington deployed them on Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor on the night of March 4. When dawn broke, the British found themselves staring up at artillery that could reduce their ships and positions to rubble. General William Howe evacuated Boston on March 17 without firing a shot. Knox's winter trek had liberated the first major city of the American Revolution.